Gather writes to larger chunks (MAXPHYS) instead of issuing them in
sectors.
On my SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16GB USB stick this made formatting much faster:
x before
+ after
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+ |
|+ x |
|+ x x|
|A MA||
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
N Min Max Median Avg Stddev
x 3 15.89 16.38 16 16.09 0.2570992
+ 3 0.32 0.37 0.35 0.34666667 0.025166115
Difference at 95.0% confidence
-15.7433 +/- 0.414029
-97.8455% +/- 0.25668%
(Student's t, pooled s = 0.182665)